The Saving Lie: Harold Bloom and Deconstruction

Chapter One: Life in Agon: From Romanticism to Deconstruction and Beyond

Chapter 1 Life in Agon: From Romanticism to Deconstruction and Beyond Take man and his struggle of contraries out of nature, and you are left with the barren, with the same dull round all over again, the merely cyclic movement, if such it can be termed, of negations. —Harold Bloom, “Dialectics of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell” (RT, 62) Although Bloom considers himself to be a heir of the romantic tradition , his own understanding of this “visionary company,” which has haunted his imagination for years, is, in fact, highly revisionary. It runs completely against the popular cliché according to which romanticism was an attempt to recreate a mythical reconciliation with nature in the unwelcoming circumstances of modern disenchantment. Thus, if Bloom allies himself with the Romantic struggle against “the universe of death,” it is not in favor of a naturalistic notion of life with its Schillerian pagan overtones, but in favor of his own idea of life as thriving on Blakean contraries ; a life that transcends natural limitations and multiplies its vitality by engaging in an idiosyncratic “antithetical quest.” From Concern to Antithesis Then was the serpent templeform’d, image of infinite Shut up in finite revolutions, and man became an Angel, Heaven a mighty circle turning, God a tyrant crown’d. —William Blake, Europe 33 The romantic phase in Bloom’s progress starts in 1959 with the publication of his dissertation, Shelley’s Mythmaking. It goes through collections of essays on early and late romantics written in the ’60s, culminates in The Anxiety of Influence and Yeats, and then begins to wane, producing in 1976 yet another volume of separate texts, Figures of Capable Imagination. On the other hand, to call Bloom’s interest in romanticism a “phase” is somewhat misleading, for, as I will argue in this book, Bloom never abandoned his romantic self: his agon with deconstruction, which, starting with The Anxiety, lasted more than a decade (Agon being the last book in this series), is densely suffused with romantic tropes and motives. The romantic “phase,” therefore, can be seen as a preparatory stage in which Bloom first repeats the lessons he took from his early masters—M. H. Abrams and Northrop Frye—and then gradually sheds their influence by seeking more antithetical solutions. Thus, if the book on Shelley concerns itself mostly with mythopoiesis (mythmaking) as a poetic way of finding, however transient, the moment of reconciliation with the world of nature, his later work will show more and more signs of discontent with the very notion of myth. His anti-Fryean reading of Blake, whom he will portray as a poet of tireless strife, scoffing any reconciliation with the fallen world, as well as his severe criticism of Yeats’s penchant for mythological thinking, shutting his Vision in “finite revolutions,” betray a tendency that will eventually become dominant. Instead of looking for mythopoiesis in romantic poets, Bloom will detect in their writings a partly Gnostic, and partly messianic anxiety, which then will become a principal attribute of his favorite hero, the antithetical man. Shelley’s Mythmaking, although drawing its explicit inspiration from Martin Buber’s I and Thou, is still a very Fryean book. Poetry is understood here as a myth made in a different way, but the introduction of Buber’s mystical encounter between mind and a part of the world, momentarily elevated to dialogic heights, as the canvas of poetic mythopoesis , immediately creates a tension the book cannot yet resolve. Says Bloom, “I do claim that a certain group of Shelley’s poems manifest precisely the mythopoeia that I have defined above,” that is, in Buberian terms. “Their myth, quite simply, is myth: the process of its making, and the inevitability of its defeat” (SM, 8). This “inevitability of defeat,” very strongly emphasized by Bloom throughout the whole book, results from two clashing tendencies. One, faithful to Frye and his teaching of symbolic archetypes, looks for the universal, the confirmation of one and the same Idea that governs the whole of the world of nature—the other, borrowed from Buber, seeks 34 the antithetical quester instantaneous, singularized moments of recognition in which fragments of nature appear to the poetic eye as individual and subjectified. The one aspires to the “possibility of a Thou as a kind of universal mind in nature” (SM, 23–24), which would be able to ground logos, also poetic one—the other derives from nondiscursive, rapturous...